I will not bring up pronouns or cultural language in this comment at all after this paragraph. They are irrelevant to the point I’m making except as a tiny detail in the cultural context section; being trans is almost entirely about one’s body-form phenotype, and is only just barely about cultural context like words, by nature of words being a way to acknowledge of body-form phenotype intention.
Upvoted, since I found your comment useful to reply to with disagreement.
Background:
In the genome there are encoded some set of phenotype controller circuits which, when grown, connect with each other using some set of communication mechanisms, recently revealed by michael levin to be impressively dynamic at runtime via bioelectricity, and known before that in the field of evo devo; these circuits then unfold over the course of development into the organization of cells we call a grown body. In the brain, these circuits are what we call biological neural networks; but those communication circuits have much of the adaptability and dynamic communication of neurons in the rest of the body, as well, which is how the body establishes consensus about which cells are which component. In the process of this development, these networks assign themselves a physiological form gender; intersex people get a mix of attributes at this stage, but for most people, even for most trans people, this stage almost entirely selects one profile of sexual dimorphism; typically for people with XX chromosomes, this stage selects female, and for people with XY, this stage selects male. However, it’s well known to science and can be looked up that sometimes people can be apparently entirely one body-form and have no desire or urge to transition, and yet have opposite chromosomes from their body’s layout-presentation.
In the brain, there are prewired circuits, which develop their connectivity-shapes into representations over the course of development and by encountering the world—in particular, by encountering photons through the eyes and the pulses of encoded video down the optic nerve, and into the various areas of the brain that are involved in neural correlates of visual attractiveness of self and other. Some of these circuits must be in the vision system to operate correctly, though I don’t know the current state of the neuroscience and GPT4 says it’s still somewhat weak, so be aware that I am working from general neuroscience knowledge not specific research on attractiveness, but it is already known that the vision system is almost entirely learned after development from a very low detail pretrained wiring pattern initially generated from the genome during gestation. over the course of childhood development, object recognition develops in tandem with person recognition, organizing each percept into a pattern of neural activations which encode the experience. During puberty circuits activate which begin to train recognizers of self and other as attractive, and society has decided that a safe margin for how long this takes to stabilize into consensus with caution and risk estimation networks is until age 18.
Some of these networks, presumably and by hunch from my perspective as an adult trans person, seem likely to me to overlap with those involved in proprioception and self-recognition. It’s known in a lot of detail, as neuroscience goes, that humans have detailed “phantom bodies”, maps of the body in the brain which track the current volumetric shape of the body as one moves around; if you are someone who can imagine your hand being touched and sort of “feel it”, then the neural activations to implement that “sorta feel it” are likely in your phantom body representation. This is the network that keeps tracking limbs after they’re lost, and in which phantom pain occurs. There’s been a lot of research on it in various forms of VR going back since before VR became a consumer technology, such as the rubber hand illusion—a fun video on youtube demonstrates this.
Orientation and self-orientation
Humans are known to develop highly selective pattern matchers that recognize the objectively fairly small differences between the sexual dimorphism layout of others’ bodies. It is now commonly accepted that it is normal and natural, found in many species besides humans as well, that these selective pattern matchers can form to activate on visual and other sensory inputs that indicate the presence of either an opposite or same sexual dimorphism layout human, according to the observer’s attraction. It has been hypothesized, though originally it was proposed (by a researcher I feel was quite prejudiced) in a narrow way which proposed it as an edge case of brain functionality rather than a central path of functionality, that this could also apply to the self; that is, that as part of sexual dimorphism, there are both networks which recognize others’ forms and networks which recognize the self’s form. For a straight, cis person, these networks would select an opposite-sex attraction for other and a same-sex attraction for self; that is, self is seen by vision networks as attractive to others when self is attractive according to the recognizer for ones own gender-form. Just as the attractiveness of others is a recognizer that is initialized by the genome to a strongly sexually dimorphic prior and trained over the course of development to recognize the specifics of others, the recognizer for self is likely initialized strongly sexually dimorphic and learns the details of what a self can look like by both observing others and self. It is quite common for those who wish to find human connection to seek to be attractive by their own standards, rather than the standards of their partner; and person A select partners B according to whether that partner B shares person A’s standards, at least to a first pass, of what makes person A attractive.
Of course, the majority of human romantic attraction’s distinguishing bits come from personality attraction, as body-form attraction is a rather wide selector that activates on many people, but romantic attraction is a narrow selector that depends on high rate of fluid and comfortable interaction. I imagine that, similarly, there are some degree of personality characteristics defined by attractiveness archetypes; I don’t have any particular very strong evidence for this at the moment like I do for most other things up to this point, but it’s often the case that trans people—people who find it upsetting, or at least highly worth acting on, for their body-form to not match some latent expectation or preference they have—to also find there were hints in their behavior for years up to the point where they decided to transition.
There are a variety of factors that could be hypothesized to cause the accumulation of aesthetic preference into the networks that are prewired to hold self-form attractiveness rating and preference; for thousands of years, various cultures have had records of people whose self-form customization and aesthetic customization tightly matched that of those with the opposite sexual dimorphism profile—binary trans people being those who, after standard childhood learning of the patterns of dimorphic aesthetic presentation in the culture they grow up in, find that their strong preference is to move into the presentation attractor typically selected by people with opposite initial-development body sexual dimorphism. Nonbinary people would be the ones for whom their self-presentation preference is specifically to straddle the blurry aesthetic line between presentation and/or body-form attractors. Cis people are those who find that their body-form and presentation preference is well within the culturally and genetically defined template for their initial body-form networks.
phenotype self preference
[edit a year later: there probably is or will be a different term of art for this that I may even know by the time you people read this, but do not at time of edit]
So, having argued through that brains appear to have these self and other recognition networks, that the way these networks land takes in a variety of factors—the only argument left to make is that some people have a strong, innate desire to customize their body form into a different one than their initial phenotype-configuration network throughout their body assigned itself at birth. For example, an AFAB trans person—assigned female at birth; though really the assignment mostly during gestation—is someone who wishes to transition from female bodyform to some other mix of dimorphic traits, most commonly but not always entirely male. AMAB trans people are those whose initial phenotype networks chose male, but for whom the phenotype networks in the brain chose something else, most typically entirely female.
For what it’s worth, I expect that it will turn out that both orientation and self-orientation will turn out to be genetically encoded, and that the reason they don’t always change in tandem is because it’s very hard for biology to encode them as exactly the same network—the self-recognition networks can make use of the general phenotype-network configuration flags, but each individual component of phenotype configuration is a separate downstream network which activates in the appropriate location in the body, and the ones that unfold into a brain have a bunch of additional complexity from being neurons that make the cells involved able to go out of consensus with the rest of the body.
And then here’s the key bit: to respect trans people’s agency as minds, agree with their mind that their body may be updated. To force trans people to be subject to the whims of the phenotype-network of their body outside their mind, demand they obey that network and not attempt to customize their form into the form their low-level mind would recognize as an attractive self. Cis people customize their forms to satisfice their attractiveness to those who attracted to their phenotype as well, after all.
The thing that defines a trans person is someone whose phenotype is in incomplete consensus between body and mind on the dimension of sexual and gender-aesthetic dimorphism. As technology advances and we become more and more able to exactly customize all of our phenotypes, including cis people, all beings will become more able to come into consensus about the little details of preferences they have about how their body should reshape itself, and trans people are merely one of the ways people would like to customize their forms.
After all, the most common and critical phenotype customization people want? They want to be healthy and have long life, free of disease or biological malfunction. The entire field of healthcare exists to help people maintain their phenotypes, customizing them to be fit, healthy, free of disease, and attractive.
I am very new to the transgender discussion and would like to learn. I expected the disagreement but was kind of discouraged when I didn’t get any feedback. So thank you so much for the reply.
I don’t have any real depth of understanding about the biology involved just xx and xy I was completely unaware about the brain body relation you describe. The entirety of how phenotypes work is super new. From an ignorant perspective I thought there was only a mental illness that happens in rarely which a person would hyper fixate on becoming the opposite sex. Given that it seemed that overcoming this in some way if possible would be the ideal outcome. As I was trying to relate it to my experience of becoming an atheist. The simplicity I saw in the world and the lack of cognitive dissonance was and is beautiful. The entire area of transgender from my perspective looks like a jumbled mess that I quickly compared to religion. This is the main factor that lead to the interpretation I did end up taking.
I think there is an important factor for me that you talked about is the amount of technology available the current perspective vs a transhumanist perspective. The stories you hear about gender transitions going wrong are kind of terrifying which definitely tempered my initial take. However eventually it will be much safer and the transition much more complete. Kind of a digression but I can’t wait to be bird. Imagine learning to fly, or climb as monkey, or swim as tuna. Seriously, one day I’ll do all of those things. At that point if you wish to be a woman, man or something in between, then I would be happy for that to happen. I don’t however have that confidence with current technology and it makes me very uncomfortable. This is the second reason I took the stance I did.
Learning about the way the brain interprets attractiveness and sex is informative and very important for the issue. I think there is a lot more to learn and I am excited that the whole thing isn’t as surface level as I thought. That means I get to learn stuff which is always great.
Also regarding my initial post I would like to apologize for the language I used, a delusion definitely isn’t the right term for the issue, it has all the wrong connotations.
[edit: pinned to profile]
I will not bring up pronouns or cultural language in this comment at all after this paragraph. They are irrelevant to the point I’m making except as a tiny detail in the cultural context section; being trans is almost entirely about one’s body-form phenotype, and is only just barely about cultural context like words, by nature of words being a way to acknowledge of body-form phenotype intention.
Upvoted, since I found your comment useful to reply to with disagreement.
Background:
In the genome there are encoded some set of phenotype controller circuits which, when grown, connect with each other using some set of communication mechanisms, recently revealed by michael levin to be impressively dynamic at runtime via bioelectricity, and known before that in the field of evo devo; these circuits then unfold over the course of development into the organization of cells we call a grown body. In the brain, these circuits are what we call biological neural networks; but those communication circuits have much of the adaptability and dynamic communication of neurons in the rest of the body, as well, which is how the body establishes consensus about which cells are which component. In the process of this development, these networks assign themselves a physiological form gender; intersex people get a mix of attributes at this stage, but for most people, even for most trans people, this stage almost entirely selects one profile of sexual dimorphism; typically for people with XX chromosomes, this stage selects female, and for people with XY, this stage selects male. However, it’s well known to science and can be looked up that sometimes people can be apparently entirely one body-form and have no desire or urge to transition, and yet have opposite chromosomes from their body’s layout-presentation.
In the brain, there are prewired circuits, which develop their connectivity-shapes into representations over the course of development and by encountering the world—in particular, by encountering photons through the eyes and the pulses of encoded video down the optic nerve, and into the various areas of the brain that are involved in neural correlates of visual attractiveness of self and other. Some of these circuits must be in the vision system to operate correctly, though I don’t know the current state of the neuroscience and GPT4 says it’s still somewhat weak, so be aware that I am working from general neuroscience knowledge not specific research on attractiveness, but it is already known that the vision system is almost entirely learned after development from a very low detail pretrained wiring pattern initially generated from the genome during gestation. over the course of childhood development, object recognition develops in tandem with person recognition, organizing each percept into a pattern of neural activations which encode the experience. During puberty circuits activate which begin to train recognizers of self and other as attractive, and society has decided that a safe margin for how long this takes to stabilize into consensus with caution and risk estimation networks is until age 18.
Some of these networks, presumably and by hunch from my perspective as an adult trans person, seem likely to me to overlap with those involved in proprioception and self-recognition. It’s known in a lot of detail, as neuroscience goes, that humans have detailed “phantom bodies”, maps of the body in the brain which track the current volumetric shape of the body as one moves around; if you are someone who can imagine your hand being touched and sort of “feel it”, then the neural activations to implement that “sorta feel it” are likely in your phantom body representation. This is the network that keeps tracking limbs after they’re lost, and in which phantom pain occurs. There’s been a lot of research on it in various forms of VR going back since before VR became a consumer technology, such as the rubber hand illusion—a fun video on youtube demonstrates this.
Orientation and self-orientation
Humans are known to develop highly selective pattern matchers that recognize the objectively fairly small differences between the sexual dimorphism layout of others’ bodies. It is now commonly accepted that it is normal and natural, found in many species besides humans as well, that these selective pattern matchers can form to activate on visual and other sensory inputs that indicate the presence of either an opposite or same sexual dimorphism layout human, according to the observer’s attraction. It has been hypothesized, though originally it was proposed (by a researcher I feel was quite prejudiced) in a narrow way which proposed it as an edge case of brain functionality rather than a central path of functionality, that this could also apply to the self; that is, that as part of sexual dimorphism, there are both networks which recognize others’ forms and networks which recognize the self’s form. For a straight, cis person, these networks would select an opposite-sex attraction for other and a same-sex attraction for self; that is, self is seen by vision networks as attractive to others when self is attractive according to the recognizer for ones own gender-form. Just as the attractiveness of others is a recognizer that is initialized by the genome to a strongly sexually dimorphic prior and trained over the course of development to recognize the specifics of others, the recognizer for self is likely initialized strongly sexually dimorphic and learns the details of what a self can look like by both observing others and self. It is quite common for those who wish to find human connection to seek to be attractive by their own standards, rather than the standards of their partner; and person A select partners B according to whether that partner B shares person A’s standards, at least to a first pass, of what makes person A attractive.
Of course, the majority of human romantic attraction’s distinguishing bits come from personality attraction, as body-form attraction is a rather wide selector that activates on many people, but romantic attraction is a narrow selector that depends on high rate of fluid and comfortable interaction. I imagine that, similarly, there are some degree of personality characteristics defined by attractiveness archetypes; I don’t have any particular very strong evidence for this at the moment like I do for most other things up to this point, but it’s often the case that trans people—people who find it upsetting, or at least highly worth acting on, for their body-form to not match some latent expectation or preference they have—to also find there were hints in their behavior for years up to the point where they decided to transition.
There are a variety of factors that could be hypothesized to cause the accumulation of aesthetic preference into the networks that are prewired to hold self-form attractiveness rating and preference; for thousands of years, various cultures have had records of people whose self-form customization and aesthetic customization tightly matched that of those with the opposite sexual dimorphism profile—binary trans people being those who, after standard childhood learning of the patterns of dimorphic aesthetic presentation in the culture they grow up in, find that their strong preference is to move into the presentation attractor typically selected by people with opposite initial-development body sexual dimorphism. Nonbinary people would be the ones for whom their self-presentation preference is specifically to straddle the blurry aesthetic line between presentation and/or body-form attractors. Cis people are those who find that their body-form and presentation preference is well within the culturally and genetically defined template for their initial body-form networks.
phenotype self preference
[edit a year later: there probably is or will be a different term of art for this that I may even know by the time you people read this, but do not at time of edit]
So, having argued through that brains appear to have these self and other recognition networks, that the way these networks land takes in a variety of factors—the only argument left to make is that some people have a strong, innate desire to customize their body form into a different one than their initial phenotype-configuration network throughout their body assigned itself at birth. For example, an AFAB trans person—assigned female at birth; though really the assignment mostly during gestation—is someone who wishes to transition from female bodyform to some other mix of dimorphic traits, most commonly but not always entirely male. AMAB trans people are those whose initial phenotype networks chose male, but for whom the phenotype networks in the brain chose something else, most typically entirely female.
For what it’s worth, I expect that it will turn out that both orientation and self-orientation will turn out to be genetically encoded, and that the reason they don’t always change in tandem is because it’s very hard for biology to encode them as exactly the same network—the self-recognition networks can make use of the general phenotype-network configuration flags, but each individual component of phenotype configuration is a separate downstream network which activates in the appropriate location in the body, and the ones that unfold into a brain have a bunch of additional complexity from being neurons that make the cells involved able to go out of consensus with the rest of the body.
And then here’s the key bit: to respect trans people’s agency as minds, agree with their mind that their body may be updated. To force trans people to be subject to the whims of the phenotype-network of their body outside their mind, demand they obey that network and not attempt to customize their form into the form their low-level mind would recognize as an attractive self. Cis people customize their forms to satisfice their attractiveness to those who attracted to their phenotype as well, after all.
The thing that defines a trans person is someone whose phenotype is in incomplete consensus between body and mind on the dimension of sexual and gender-aesthetic dimorphism. As technology advances and we become more and more able to exactly customize all of our phenotypes, including cis people, all beings will become more able to come into consensus about the little details of preferences they have about how their body should reshape itself, and trans people are merely one of the ways people would like to customize their forms.
After all, the most common and critical phenotype customization people want? They want to be healthy and have long life, free of disease or biological malfunction. The entire field of healthcare exists to help people maintain their phenotypes, customizing them to be fit, healthy, free of disease, and attractive.
I am very new to the transgender discussion and would like to learn. I expected the disagreement but was kind of discouraged when I didn’t get any feedback. So thank you so much for the reply.
I don’t have any real depth of understanding about the biology involved just xx and xy I was completely unaware about the brain body relation you describe. The entirety of how phenotypes work is super new. From an ignorant perspective I thought there was only a mental illness that happens in rarely which a person would hyper fixate on becoming the opposite sex. Given that it seemed that overcoming this in some way if possible would be the ideal outcome. As I was trying to relate it to my experience of becoming an atheist. The simplicity I saw in the world and the lack of cognitive dissonance was and is beautiful. The entire area of transgender from my perspective looks like a jumbled mess that I quickly compared to religion. This is the main factor that lead to the interpretation I did end up taking.
I think there is an important factor for me that you talked about is the amount of technology available the current perspective vs a transhumanist perspective. The stories you hear about gender transitions going wrong are kind of terrifying which definitely tempered my initial take. However eventually it will be much safer and the transition much more complete. Kind of a digression but I can’t wait to be bird. Imagine learning to fly, or climb as monkey, or swim as tuna. Seriously, one day I’ll do all of those things. At that point if you wish to be a woman, man or something in between, then I would be happy for that to happen. I don’t however have that confidence with current technology and it makes me very uncomfortable. This is the second reason I took the stance I did.
Learning about the way the brain interprets attractiveness and sex is informative and very important for the issue. I think there is a lot more to learn and I am excited that the whole thing isn’t as surface level as I thought. That means I get to learn stuff which is always great.
Also regarding my initial post I would like to apologize for the language I used, a delusion definitely isn’t the right term for the issue, it has all the wrong connotations.